Yep. If Valve ever announces an IPO, they should be considered dead and we should all start to migrate away.

The fact that they are privately owned is the reason why they are even capable of caring about things besides profit above all else. Large groups of people like boards of directors and shareholders are only capable of caring about things in their lowest common denominator that virtually every person cares about, such as having more money.

Note how all VC-owned and publicly traded companies behave like perfectly predictable clones of one another. They are all just apparatuses for money production, with the actual product they sell, their literal means of making the money, an afterthought.

This is true, but also kind of depressing that Capitalism is now so insidious that people treat gaben like some kind of benevolent philanthropist for choosing to sit on a huge ongoing cash cow that makes more money directly to his bank account than he's physically able to spend, rather than IPO it.

Linus Torvalds does not use Linux as his personal computer.

Yes he does. I would imagine the same one he built on camera in 2025 for his desktop. He has been seen with mac laptops, but they had ashahi linux on them.

Edit: I should add around 2011-2015 he did daily drive a mac, so a long time ago.

I thought Linus used Fedora and that systemd was made by Poettering as a personal project unrelated to his work at Red Hat.

Could you please correct the misinformation regarding Linus Torvalds in the body properly and not just in an appended edit notice? Thank you.

Also because of their no-DRM policy, some Windows games from GOG are actually more compatible with Wine because the DRM was removed.

In my Steam collection I actually have a situation of a game which won't run in Linux from Steam no matter what I do, yet the pirate version of that game runs just fine in Linux (and in fact that's the only way I can enjoy my purchase), whilst in my much larger GOG collection I have no such situation.

Heroic Launcher connects with GoG, so you don't need to wait for this. I'm still happy it's coming, but we do have other options.

I also bought those games when they were on sale!

Personally, I like the Ultima series of games

I started with Bottles, then switched to Lutris, which dramatically improves the experience. I now (and for a while now) use Heroic Launcher. It's my preference. Lutris has still been useful, in particular for installing Escape from Tarkov from an install script for Singleplayer Tarkov (or whatever it's called now). Heroic doesn't support that as far as I'm aware. It does connect with Steam, GoG, and Epic though, so you can buy and play games from those through it.

Yeah I usually do the same. Offline installers are a pretty big benefit. I like to know a lot of games are available offline.

Lutris & Heroic already install all windows GOG games into Wine +/- Proton prefixes using some simple automation. The bar for an official GOG launcher to achieve the same isn't that high if they want to go down that route. Proton is freely available and open source, so GOG can use it too if they want (and would be sensible to do so).

All of those old games just run through wine or dosbox. They install just fine through GoG Galaxy. GoG Galaxy has been on macOS for years.

Proton is not part of Steam. It's a package that you can run games on from anywhere. Yes, this will need WINE and likely Proton, and it's easy enough to have the launcher use those, as Heroic and Lutris already do (or as you can do from the terminal).

There are actually many DRM free games on Steam [link], most notably Cyberpunk 2077.

I feel like this and DRM are the two things people point out as GoG's benefits, but first of all GoG also sells you a license, so it's EXACTLY the same as Steam. The "difference" is in the other point, because without DRM games bought on GoG can be backed up and installed again without needing GoGs approval, but this ignores two HUGE caveats:

• GoG also allows DRM on their store, with some games having DRM for DLCs or extra content.
• Steam doesn't require DRM, so all games that are DRM free on GoG are most likely also DRM free on Steam.

All in all this means that in regards to ownership morally GoG is essentially the same as Valve, they just have better PR about it.

PS: To give credit where it's due, GoG is a lot more restrictive with what DRM it allows, and you can expect most of the game you bought to be playable without DRM there. However I feel that allowing me to play on my libre OS is a lot more morally significant than the difference between those two DRM stances.

Not really. GOG has the moral highground on game ownership but Steam has it on hardware ownership, which I would argue is more valuable. I do wish Valve would do more against all of the terrible trends in the gaming industry but I'll accept everything they're doing to push forward an open ecosystem as a whole instead.

First of all let's get something out of the way, I don't think Valve is doing anything to be nice, they're doing it because it's in their best interest, however their best interest happens to align with mine.

I don't expect GoG to do what Valve is doing, but porting Galaxy to Linux has been the most requested feature on GoG for a LONG while, and honestly it's not that hard to do, especially considering they have a Mac version. If they can't even dedicate one programmer for one month to implement the most requested feature for their app, and allow me to play their games on my "steam machine" then they don't really care about my money.